Print Typography

April 6, 2015

As human societies emerged, the develop of writing was driven by pragmatic exigencies such as exchanging information, maintain codifying laws and record history.

In most languages, writing is a complement to speech or spoken language. Writing is not a language but a form of technology.Within a language system, writing relies on many of the same structures as speech, such as vocabulary, grammar and semantics, with the added dependency of a system of signs or symbols, usually in the form of a formal alphabet. The result of writing is called text, and the recipient of text is called a reader.

Alphabets

In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation.

Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of their letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order.

It also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of “numbering” ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum.

The term “alphabet” is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense.

Etymology

The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Greek (alphabētos), from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.

Alpha and beta in turn came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and originally meant ox and house respectively.

Informally the term “ABCs” is sometimes used for the alphabet as in the alphabet song, and knowing one’s ABCs for literacy, or as a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything.

In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation.
Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of their letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order.

It also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of “numbering” ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum.

Typography is the use of type to advocate, communicate, celebrate, educate, elaborate, illuminate, and disseminate. Along the way, the words and pages become art.

James Felici

Another terminology is that of deep and shallow orthographies, where the depth of an orthography is the degree to which it diverges from being truly phonemic

In an ideal phonemic orthography, there would be a complete one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes (letters) and the phonemes of the language, and each phoneme would invariably be represented by its corresponding grapheme.

This would mean that the spelling of a word would unambiguously and transparently indicate its pronunciation; and conversely that a speaker knowing the pronunciation of a word would be able to infer its spelling without any doubt.

This ideal situation is rarely if ever achieved in practice – it seems that nearly all alphabetic orthographies deviate from it to some degree or other.